“The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is work­ing with sev­en U.S. uni­ver­si­ties and ele­ments of the Air Force and Army on research that seeks to stim­u­late the brain in a non-inva­sive way to speed up learn­ing.

DARPA announced the Tar­get­ed Neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty Train­ing, or TNT, pro­gram last March, and work now has begun on the effort to dis­cov­er the safest and most effec­tive ways to acti­vate a nat­ur­al process called “synap­tic plas­tic­i­ty.”

Plas­tic­i­ty is the brain’s abil­i­ty to strength­en or weak­en its neur­al con­nec­tions to adapt to changes in the envi­ron­ment. For TNT Pro­gram Man­ag­er Dr. Doug Weber, such plas­tic­i­ty is about learn­ing.”

An Ari­zona State Uni­ver­si­ty team is tar­get­ing trigem­i­nal nerve stim­u­la­tion to pro­mote synap­tic plas­tic­i­ty in the brain’s sen­so­ri­mo­tor and visu­al sys­tems.

A Wright State Uni­ver­si­ty-Ohio team will iden­ti­fy epi­ge­net­ic mark­ers of neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty and indi­ca­tors of a person’s response to vagal nerve stim­u­la­tion, or VNS.

A Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty-Mary­land team focus­es on brain regions involved in speech and hear­ing to under­stand plasticity’s effects on lan­guage learn­ing.

A Uni­ver­si­ty of Flori­da team is iden­ti­fy­ing which brain neur­al path­ways VNS acti­vates.

Anoth­er Uni­ver­si­ty of Flori­da team will com­bine flu­o­res­cent imag­ing and opto­ge­net­ics to test neur­al cir­cu­ity that con­nects cen­ters in the deep brain to deci­sion-mak­ing regions in the pre­frontal cor­tex, and opti­mize VNS para­me­ters in this cir­cuit­ry.

A Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land team is study­ing the impact of VNS on for­eign lan­guage learn­ing.

A Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas-Dal­las team is iden­ti­fy­ing stim­u­la­tion para­me­ters to max­i­mize plas­tic­i­ty, and com­par­ing the effects of inva­sive ver­sus non-inva­sive stim­u­la­tion in peo­ple with tin­ni­tus as they per­form com­plex learn­ing tasks such as acquir­ing a for­eign lan­guage.

A Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin team is using state-of-the-art opti­cal imag­ing, elec­tro­phys­i­ol­o­gy and neu­ro­chem­i­cal sens­ing tech­niques in ani­mal mod­els to mea­sure the influ­ence of vagal and trigem­i­nal nerve stim­u­la­tion on boost­ing neu­ro­mod­u­la­to­ry neu­ron activ­i­ty in the brain.

The Program

Tar­get­ed Neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty Train­ing (TNT) seeks to advance the pace and effec­tive­ness of a spe­cif­ic kind of learning—cognitive skills training—through the pre­cise acti­va­tion of periph­er­al nerves that can in turn pro­mote and strength­en neu­ronal con­nec­tions in the brain. TNT will pur­sue devel­op­ment of a plat­form tech­nol­o­gy to enhance learn­ing of a wide range of cog­ni­tive skills, with a goal of reduc­ing the cost and dura­tion of the Defense Department’s exten­sive train­ing reg­i­men, while improv­ing out­comes. If suc­cess­ful, TNT could accel­er­ate learn­ing and reduce the time need­ed to train for­eign lan­guage spe­cial­ists, intel­li­gence ana­lysts, cryp­tog­ra­phers, and oth­ers.

About SharpBrains

As seen in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BBC News, CNN, Reuters and more, SharpBrains is an independent market research firm tracking health and performance applications of brain science.